Colleen Hoover is an American author best known for her 2016 romance novel It Ends with Us. On January 26, 2022, reports surfaced that the best-selling novel will be turned into a movie with Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni playing the main characters.

Lively will star as Lily Bloom, a small-town girl who moves to Boston with hopes of starting a business. Justin Baldoni will direct the film, and star alongside Lively as Ryle Kincaid, the neurosurgeon Lily falls in love with.

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“As Lily finds herself becoming the exception to [Ryle’s] ‘no dating’ rule, she can’t help but wonder what made him that way in the first place,” the book’s description reads. “As questions about her new relationship overwhelms her, so do thoughts of Atlas Corrigan — her first love and a link to the past she left behind. He was her kindred spirit, her protector. When Atlas suddenly reappears, everything Lily has built with Ryle is threatened.”

Who is Colleen Hoover?

Colleen Hoover was born on December 11, 1979, in Sulphur Springs, Texas, to Vannoy Fite and Eddie Fennell. She grew up in Saltillo, Texas, and graduated from Saltillo High School in 1998.

Hoover married Heath Hoover in 2000, and they have three sons. Hoover graduated from Texas A&M-Commerce with a degree in social work. After the success of Slammed, Hoover quit her job in the social work field to become a full-time writer.

In November 2011, she wrote her debut novel, Slammed, with no intention of getting published. Hoover self-published Slammed in January 2012. Hoover states that she published the novel so her mother, who had just gotten an Amazon Kindle, could read it. A sequel, Point of Retreat, was published in February 2012.

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After a few months, Slammed was reviewed and given 5 stars by book blogger Maryse Black, after which sales rapidly took off. Slammed and Point of Retreat reached #8 and #18, respectively, on the New York Times Best Seller list in August 2012.

Atria Books picked up the novels and republished them. A third book in the series, This Girl, was published in April 2013.

Hoover’s novel Hopeless was self-published in December 2012 and became #1 on the New York Times Best Seller list .It was the first self-published novel to ever top the list.

Hoover’s novel It Ends with Us was published in 2016 and in 2021, it gained traction on #BookTok community on TikTok.As a result, in January 2022 It Ends with Us was #1 on The New York Times best sellers list. As of 2019, the novel had sold over a million copies worldwide and been translated into over twenty languages.

A sequel to It Ends with Us titled It Starts with Us was published on October 18, 2022, and published by Atria Books.